People are the number one resource in every company. Very specific and rare skills are becoming more and more important, leading to an amplified need for multidisciplinary and ever-developing teams that can efficiently address a multitude of needs. For a leader, oiling this machine is the number one priority.
Co-creation is the key method for utilizing the best skills of every person, ensuring people are committed to decisions, and improving employee engagement. Every good leader facilitates co-creation all the time. If you look through the buzzword, you’ll find that it’s nothing overly complicated. When a leader starts a conversation, whether that’s in a meeting or a new email thread, it’s co-creation.
However, the main challenges with traditional co-creation are:
- How do you move from open discussion to structured answers?
- How do you minimize the effect of the facilitator’s prejudices?
- How do you ensure equal participation of people with different personalities and roles?
A competent consultant knows that facilitating co-creation requires time and a lot of experience. Often, energy wears out before getting near the real outcome, and once there it’s often just a shared photo of a messy flipboard.
There are dozens of co-creation tools available ranging from simple surveys to module-based project management software seeking to improve on these traditional methods. Many companies have actually adapted one of these tools but responsibility of fostering co-creation is pushed to HR or to a software administrator. Leaders express their commitment to the new tool in theory while still going about using their meetings and emails as the main methods of co-creation.
If leaders sees the importance in co-creation, why do they insist on using email instead of a more suitable co-creation tool? A leader is not a leader because they are great with complex stuff, a leader is a leader because they excel in simplifying complexity. If a leader refuses to start doing anything new then it’s a sign the co-creation platform is just too complicated.
Get Early Access to our smart co-creation Slack bot.
After discussing with dozens of leaders, we decided to further simplify our co-creation tool Innoduel to make it fit for the modern leader. We decided the new user experience must meet the following criteria:
- The co-creation result is so intuitive that the leader and the participants understand it without any interpretation
- You don’t need any new co-creation software but rather it integrates to your existing ones like email and Slack
- It must be so fast that you save time for both the leader and the participants
- The participants really feel their opinions count
Co-creation with the new Innoduel user experience is like asking a question from your people using Slack or email except that you address the question first to Innoduel’s AI bot. The participants produce and compare answer proposals to your question, which results in a prioritized list of top answers to the leader’s question. You can still access our admin portal but there is no real need for that 90% of the time.
To lead is to co-create.
If you are interested in beta testing our novel approach, then you can get early access here.